back to the big picture with christmas just a few days away millions of americans will spend this weekend not only traveling but also reading and watching some of their favorite christmas stories across america families will cozy up to the fireplace and watch classics like it's a wonderful life or a christmas story and who can forget charles dickens classic a christmas carol well to celebrate the holiday season we put together our own version of a christmas carol with a big picture spin stories of christmas past present and future will help us take

a look at what america was like during the days of f.d.r. and the new deal what it is like today as the right wing wages war on the middle class and what it might look like in the future if we're forced to deal with the perils of climate change we begin tonight with christmas past. for the ghost of christmas past let's take a look back at early twentieth century america as our nation struggled to make it through the great depression what they called at that time the republican great depression and to find a solution that would put americans back to work and rebuild the economy join him in a joining me now from los angeles is richard esko senior fellow at the campaign for america's future richard welcome back to the program. always good to be here thanks thanks for joining us i had christian freeland on the program a couple of weeks ago and she argued that the most agalloch tarion time in the history of america was in the in the two generations of and immediately following

the founding of this nation to do great. no not really i think that we saw some of the you know i think that the history of that period the early american history tends to leave out large segments of our population at that time slaves for example but you know i think what we have now is a period where in recent memory where the statistics are a lot more reliable we had a movement towards much greater egalitarianism in the one nine hundred thirty s. as you mentioned and in the one nine hundred sixty s. in the one nine hundred fifty s. under during the eisenhower even in the forty's after the second world war so i think we have periods of time in recent memory that are very well documented where we wanted to be a just and fair and egalitarian society and made huge strides toward doing that it can be done what was america like just before the new deal we're going to shape up for the new deal well first of all of course we had a great depression massive and widespread poverty and i don't need to remind you or

most of your viewers that the source of the great depression was also the source of the financial crisis of two thousand and eight which was regulated and under regulated banking behavior criminality and so forth so we had that widespread poverty and all the almost we also had senior poverty that at the most conservative estimates was above fifty percent about fifty to fifty three percent and that's why the roosevelt administration responded with the w.p.a. and other initiatives to put people back to work and spine the pump of the economy to get it going again created social security which drops senior poverty from fifty two percent to somewhere around fourteen or fifteen percent and got things really moving that we know how to do this is paul krugman would say yeah and hi how has america during the during the new deal era one of the one of the policies the roosevelt administration was and of the united states government was the government

was the employer of last. well as i'm in the so-called free marketplace couldn't provide work for people who want to work government do so where did their go what happened. well it's hard to say behave i think we've had a philosophical shift in this country because there have been too few voices speaking up for the philosophy that roosevelt articulated for the philosophy that dwight d. eisenhower so ably put into place i'm sure you read for example the one hundred fifty six republican party platform which in which brags that eisenhower put two million more people on social security and increased its benefits which boasted that union membership was off by several million during the first his first term i think we had a consensus in this country for many years and i think we got lazy about defending it while the right and corporations got very very busy undermining it so i think that what happened is that we haven't been making the case forcefully or i take you know about the government as employer of last resort about the effectiveness of

social security and medicare and about expanding the social contract behind these programs rather than constantly working to erode it or at best to defend it and one of the other things the seemed to change with the new deal was prior to that both during the ruhr and twenty's the harding coolidge hoover era and then also during america's longest depression the one from the eight hundred seventy s. to roughly one thousand nine hundred that there was this widespread belief that if government just stayed out of the way that the marketplace and business would make everything right in fact hartings campaign slogan in one nine hundred twenty was less government in business more business and government it didn't work out so well how did we come back to thinking that how did reagan sell that to us but we sure didn't do it by learning from experience i'll tell you that because time and time again and of course there is calvin coolidge that government covered just bats

which governs least and what's good batch for g.m. good for g.m. is good for america which in some ways is true but only if it's managed well as we learned with the auto industry bailout so. because we don't learn from experience we don't study experience and again i'm going to scold a little bit those of us on the left and those of us who really represent the center if you look at the historical span of the last one hundred fifty years or hundred years we haven't made the case forcefully enough and clearly enough that these programs work their moral and they're just and they represent the best of who we are as a people we've got to get out there and do that again and it seems do you do you think richard that there could be a great forgetting as it were of that that when the you know. for which philosopher was it so that when the last man dies or remembers the last great war the next great war is inevitable that that when the generation there remember the great divide depression started to die out that the next depression became inevitable. well i think it became inevitable only sure in

a sense because vigilance is the is the price of liberty and we stopped being vigilant and i think we stopped being vigilant as corporate influence took over the political process to an unprecedented extent we're seeing that now on both sides of the aisle of the republican party is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate america democratic party with huge swaths of it are we are lazy about that too we let that happen and i think you know awareness action pushing back making it uncomfortable every single time especially the democrats try to push the corporate agenda because the republicans i don't think will will get anywhere with and getting the message out over and over again when you talk about cutting government budgets you're talking about cutting teachers and school principals and you're talking about cutting people who help other people that we've got to stop making the economic enemy in this country the bus driver who manages to make a living wage and start really saying we need to restrain unrestricted wall street

behavior we need to tax millionaires and billionaires at a reasonable level which thirty nine point five percent is not we need to really get back on the off chance in terms of saying what it took. make this country i'll be growing and successful and what it's going to take to do it again thank you richard we'll we'll see you again and a little bit for a panel discussion. thank you. now are visited by the ghost of christmas present conservatives in this country are waging an all out assault on the middle class and our democratic institutions on the market itself argue time trying to take away our health care and suppressing our votes and everything in between quite simply conservatives are trying to wipe out the middle class and create a utopia exclusively for millionaires and billionaires put across its the oligarchy and they do it by buying off and perform perverting our political system for more on the plight of democracy in america i'm joined by said johnny with aggressive

change campaign committee said welcome. great to be here tom thanks for joining us what do you think are the biggest fronts right now on in the war on american democracy in the war on the middle class. was interesting if you look at different levels it's a different organization of the state level alec the american legislative exchange council is probably the most powerful corporate front group you've never heard of when you see six or seven or eight republican dominated legislatures all introducing the same sort of bills whether it be you know a tax on unions or privatizing education or demanding environmental laws it's because this organization it's mostly driven by corporations actually gives legislators model bills you know written by b.p. or by united health care or big pharma and tells them to pass some of the legislators as if they came up with the idea you know that's one of the most powerful you know groups that no one even knows about at the national level you also have organizations like the u.s. chamber of commerce which is i've been working to undermine democracy for you know

like something like a century now so so you know we live in a moment right now where. it's our basic sort of democratic principles heard to mine by groups that have money but most people in the country are polled to one where they be you know a fair taxation system whether it be basically labor rights or basic right to health care all those things are undermined by a few with gobs and gobs of money at it all to me is very very bad for democracy is the big check my numbers here my record this is just from recollection of my my memory is that the mccain campaign the two thousand a to lecture and spent somewhere between six and seven hundred million dollars and that in this last election we had one billionaire shelley adelson who bragged about spending over one hundred million dollars we had karl rove talking about spending over one hundred million dollars you've got the koch brothers and various front groups that might have spent as much as two hundred million dollars it seems like three people you know or four of the koch brothers as to you know spent almost as much as john

mccain did to become elected president how can we call that a democracy and that's just the beginning i mean i was like that twenty some odd billionaires that largely funded the republican party nationwide in this last election. no i mean you're absolutely right i think you know that the entire system just got broken and he needs spirit from the ground up and you know there's some people who look at the election and say oh well that big money didn't work because you know the republicans were defeated but that doesn't really look at the whole picture i mean think about it this way if they're publicans are raising this much money from a handful of billionaires multimillionaires the democrats have to do the same thing to be able to compete right they didn't actually outspend the democrats in a lot of cases because democrats had to spend so much time fundraising i think someone actually just came out with the stat said that something went one percent of obama's nomination. one percent of obama's doing gave fifty dollars or less writes a small donors actually didn't have that much of a voice obama was forced to cater to a lot of the same people as the republicans because the how much money the

republicans are raising so really you know no nobody wins in this equation one policy gets corrupted you know democrats get pushed towards corporations publicans get pushed towards corporations and to when politicians should be you know attending to the needs of people meeting with constituents debating policy their fundraising i mean every single lawmaker has to do what you know they call in washington d.c. call a time where they basically call people and beg for money if some people are spending half their time literally half their time sitting members of congress making calls asking people for money governing or attending their constituents this is the definition of i think a broken system well you said nobody wins but it seems that somebody does the koch brothers or with kelly adelson his way i mean he's you know. real quickly your thoughts on that we just have to say no you're absolutely right i mean michigan best example michigan chamber of commerce the big business front group six they call for a so-called right to work a lot of question in the six days later he gets past sixty is after they called this a change their position and that's how powerful these people are and how they're

winning it's amazing thanks for joining us tonight is and we'll be back with you again toward the end of the show thank you very much. after the break we'll be visited by the ghosts of christmas future and see what could happen to america and the world if we fail to address global climate change. the worst you're going to think the only white house to give it to the radio guy and for mateo minestrone last thing i want you to watch what we're about to give you never seen anything like this i'm told. the more. important thing.

for. the long. term.

the automatic big picture is christmas carol we now move on to the ghost of christmas future. as the ghost of christmas future visits us we're looking at grim prospects for the united states and our planet if we as a society fail to take climate change seriously and do nothing to curb it joining me now is aaron hurts us communications director for the union of concerned

scientists around welcome thank thank you for having me and a union of concerned scientists one of my favorite organizations thank you so much really verses about the seventy's i was i used to correspond with is a guy who founded it and. yes it was and then there was another physician but in the case. what are what are the most alarming facts about climate change one of the most alarming facts for me is that a lot of people still don't know the basics so i like to start with the basics so scientists from every national academy of sciences all across the world all the relevant scientific societies they tell us climate change is happening the earth is warming it's caused by human activities and we can see the effects right now in our own back yards. what's alarming for scientists is that they're seeing climate change happen more quickly than they thought even just a few years ago there was just a study in nature climate change that showed sea levels are rising eighty percent faster than scientists were projecting in official government reports in two thousand and seven so is it eighty percent worse than the worst case the estimates

are or the probabilistic i thought we what we were doing was we were sliding into the worst case that we exceeded that we're sliding into it in some cases exceeding it so the changes in the planet are happening more rapidly than scientists thought they would as they respond to climate change and the emissions that are driving climate change the carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil and from destroying tropical forests that's going into the atmosphere faster than scientists expected is this the result of positive feedback loops of basically the thermostat being. wired the wrong way so that you know that that's absolutely part of it and that's where there's a lot of great ongoing scientific research is trying to figure out well just how fast it's going to happen so we see record low levels of ice in the arctic as we lose that arctic ice what's underneath it is darker ocean that absorbs more heat from the sun so that's a great example of as the earth heats up and things start to happen in nature that make it heat up even more and even faster. after superstorm sandy and we're starting to see some would say the devastating effects of climate

change that i mean we've seen species moving we've seen you know vegetation being wiped out we've seen wildfires and things where people arguably could say well you know whether it changes but that doesn't mean the climate is changing is it now irrefutable the climate is changing not just whether it's absolutely certain that climate is changing and one of the big affects of climate change that we see changes in weather that's how it manifests itself in a way that's readily apparent to us when we look at sandy the most important aspect scientists are focused on with that storm is the fact that sea levels are higher than they used to be so sandy rose in on a high tide that tide was even higher than it would have been otherwise because of climate change. and relative sea level around the east coast and in new york city it's a foot higher than it was two hundred years ago as the climate change and some of the land is actually sunk for reasons that don't have to do with climate change so if you break that down what it means is that more people are getting inundated by coastal floods so when scientists look at the relationship between extreme weather

and climate change coastal flooding and heat waves are two really clear examples where there are absolutely links to climate change when it comes to hurricanes we expect them to get stronger because the ocean is warming up in the fueling them but there are more complicated things with hurricane formation so we expect the frequency of hurricanes to stay the same or actually drop but regardless of sea levels are rising every coastal storm including hurricanes are going to be able to punch further inland you want damage understand our climate a sphere is holding about five percent more moisture now than it was in the middle of the twentieth century yes scientists typically refer to it as water vapor and that has a huge effect on the weather that we see so the percent is being taken away from later events and it's being concentrated in heavier events and the physics of this if you just picture of what your bathroom looks like after you take a hot shower the same thing is basically happening to our atmosphere so you're seeing in some areas long periods with smaller amounts of rainfall leading to more drought in other areas precipitation concentrating in those heaviest events and

then out of a person also functionally greenhouse gases absolutely it's another feedback effect so yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of things that make this a very difficult problem and we've made some progress on it as far as we're getting emissions go we need to do a lot more and we're in a space as a society now and it's been great to see mayor bloomberg governor cuomo and other leaders who are looking at how do we rebuild a new be sure communities and i'm from one of those communities i grew up with in new jersey and they're starting to ask how can we rebuild in a way that's going to take climate change into consideration so we're entering an era now where we need to simultaneously talk about preparing for climate change making more resilient communities and also keeping our eye on the ball when it comes to reducing. mission's great thank you for being king of the sins stick around for for panel here. now that we've been visited by the ghosts of christmas past present and future we've seen what america was like pre and post new deal what it's like today with the rights war on the middle class what our future could hold with the effects of climate change let's talk about ways we can work together as

a nation to build a stronger society for that works for everyone and bring back richard and zed and aaron thank you thank you all for being with us tonight. richard let me start with you climate change that aaron was just addressing is by many people viewed as a climate problem as old as a weather problem as my god is going to rain or a tornado is going to get but isn't this also an economic problem. it's a massive almost incalculably great economic problem it ranges from everything to the rely the rise in malaria borne diseases that we're going to see as there is more flooding and more water which is going to create enormous spikes in health care treatment costs of the other changes in disease patterns that are costly the massive you know people are predicting tens of millions of refugees which is going to create enormous economic displacement there in many ways large and small this is

going to contribute to enormously costly economic changes and you know the large insurance companies right now who may be conservative politically but watch the bottom line have quietly been doing a number of studies on how this might affect their losses going forward those numbers aren't pretty there is it isn't this an example of internalizing profits in xterm allies in costs we're we're not asking the oil companies and the coal companies to pay the cost of the damage that the climate change is doing and at the same time aren't they also aggressively trying to prevent us we the people our democratic institutions from doing something to prevent those externalities in the cost associated with. i mean that's exactly right and that's why you don't have to be you know a left wing buried in a progressive to see that this is wrong we don't want you know free leaders in our society like coal companies who are pumping all this stuff into the air that makes people sick and then they're not paying for the damage right if you eat you if you

do some damage you should definitely pay for it unfortunately i mean even if you type in i remember at one point if you typed in nuclear energy your wind energy into google you'd see an ad for a coal company pop up automatically you know they have a spread in a stream out of money just sort of propagandizing people time them that this is the way the economy is this is what this is what will bring jobs back yeah but they don't talk about the sort of damage to our house to our environment and ultimately to mother nature and the ability to have a stable plan in the future so iran how do we how do we get to a sustainable america how do we get there how do we make that work right now we do see a lot of the oil in the old coal companies are using their funding for political action committees and other groups to intimidate politicians to step away from even talking about climate change so i think one of ways we get there is all these companies actually do have a stake in climate change and oil company that operates for facilities for pumping oil they're going to be worried about sea level rise and they actually have to disclose some of this to the securities and exchange commission so i think that

there's a reality based community that is trying to deal with climate change like the insurance companies like national security groups they get that it's real and it's going to impact our future so that awakening to the fact we need to deal with climate change because the effects are already so large and so evident my hope is that that will shift people's attitudes and can get back to having a real debate about solutions. richard what are the other issues that are facing us in the future that you see that are sort of like you know the train coming down the tunnel sort of thing and we thought it was a white. well first of all i think on the health care front despite the passage of obamacare i think we're going to see increasing divergence between the health care that's available to poor people and lower middle income people and health care that's available to wealthy people we're having huge breakthroughs in technology and i'm afraid we're moving toward rather than away from

a two tier health care system as new technologies come online that could become even more excited so that's another big problem i think that you know we're still not addressing the issue of poverty in any meaningful way so we see poverty at what had been record numbers and holding there and that's become an invisible problem that's not going to get any better we're going to see increasing with the ongoing wage stagnation for the middle class i think we're really confronting the possibility of the death of the middle class as we know it in this country and that in a way it's like climate change we see it in the numbers we know it's coming and yet we can't mobilize people yet to understand how serious the problem is on a political level and commit them to doing something about it zed in all of these cases there are there are forces a senior. general first of them as the as the photographs are the oligarchy who don't want progressive change who don't want change that allow actually save our

nation to happen what do we do how do we get past this. well first of all i'd recommend everyone who's who's watching read the book invisible hands which is about how big business basically organize after the new deal to foster all this domination but you know i have to plug my own organization bold progressive or you know we're about fighting this corporate power with people power i mean we you know for example if it's warren a great advocate for consumers for basic every day at middle class people you know she defeated the big banks biggest ally in the senate scott brown and she did it mostly because we were raising donations literally of three dollars here five dollars here money from you know fix income seniors basically using social media and the internet to do that to be backs on the most powerful people in the country you know it's possible i think that you know america has become more unequal and more unjust but in many ways we have more tools to fight back we have the internet we have alternative media we have you know shows like yours and we have tools i

think that will surprise elites and that will get a really helped push back and when these things you know the best example was when the chicago teachers went on strike. this this past year every elite media outlet from the new york times washington post every one of the tory lies to get a said it was a terrible idea and they still wanted the main reason they wanted to because people all over the country were supporting them on social media doing to their strike find doing everything that they had so you know it's the old adage at the organized people can can beat back organize money it's a hard slog and we lose a lot of fights but eventual you know most people agree with us most people want a more decent fair country and we can get it if we were going to richard. thank you all for joining us tonight and for taking part in our big picture christmas card. and that's the way it is tonight friday december twenty first twenty well i don't forget democracy begins with you it's not a spectator sport you got to show up participate get out there occupy something get active tag your it see an x.

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